Within recent years, modular desk and work stations have replaced individual desks at isolated locations for various office personnel. With the advent of data processing, the applicants have turned to open architecture modularity to the electronic office environment, using basic building blocks in the form of a self-supporting desk module containing a large wire plenum concealed from the user, but easily accessible for service, combined with an organizing back panel or slat wall to create an interactive work place, designed specifically to house internally and to display openly various components of the data processing system including keyboard, video display, central processing units and the like. One such modular work station takes the form of a trading desk, particularly useful in stock brokerage houses, which are capable of accommodating computer, monitor and telephone equipment, as well as cabling for electrical power, voice, signal, communication, data and fiber optics. Such trading desk cluster may be formed of back-to-back, side-to-side paired desk modules. The presence of the data processing equipment requires an initial work space at the front of the desk module, along with an extended coplanar surface area dedicated to facilitating the wiring passing internally within cabinet structures beneath the desk top at the work surface and a vertical rear wall, which rises upwardly from the level of the desk top to several feet above the same. Further, in such trading desk clusters, a significant portion of the electronic processing system is housed within the cabinet structure underneath the desk top, which normally extends within a foot well from one side of each desk module to the other.
Attempts have been made to facilitate both the passage of the communication system wiring and the cooling of the electronic equipment housed within the cabinet structure. Known systems for the passage of cables do not add to the ornamentality of the desk itself, but tend to detract from the same. Additionally, the heat loads, which are quite heavy during operation of the data processing equipment, create localized hot spots and the ventilation and cooling systems for the same have to a large extent been inadequate.
It is therefore a primary object of the invention to provide an improved self-supporting data processing desk module with detachable and longitudinally shiftable exhaust fan assemblies mounted internally of the cabinet structure and optimized positionwise with respect to the electronic processing equipment including the central processing units associated with such data processing systems and to the utilization of highly versatile, flat video bridges having single or double sweep grommets along one or both edges of single or multiple panel bridges, with the multiple panels being adjustable angularly, as well as reversible to create cable passages optimized to the location of the processing equipment on the desk top or to the rear thereof on the paired desk modules.